REVIEW: Maqet – Octi

A few months back, we received an email from the folks at Maqet. Maqet markets themselves as “Collectibles By You!” The company has a fun basic idea – you go to their website and create a custom toy.

The process begins by choosing one of five basic characters (all designed by Ghostbot): Cat Girl; Petpal; Ninja; Ringo; Octi. For our Maqet, we chose Octi. Each character has a short background story. Octi’s reads as such: “Octi looks super menacing and tough on the outside, but once you give him a squeeze, he’s just a softy at heart. You can find him where the lava rocks spill into the reef. He knows how to surf big waves, speak eight languages, and DJs every Friday night under the deep blue sea”.

After choosing your character, you’ll have a few options. For Octi, there are five variant sculpts (we chose the basic version) to select from. You can pick the color combination you’d like by scrolling through hundreds of possibilities. And, for this character, you can pick one of five hairstyles.

Once you’ve completed designing your Maqet, you can choose to either share your design or buy it. If you buy your design, you have a choice of either their large figure (up to 6.5”) or their small figure (up to 4.5”). We went with the small ($20) as opposed to the larger piece ($40).

And that’s it! Place your order and about 2 weeks later, you’ll receive the figure that you designed. So…what does that figure end up looking like?

Your Maqet comes packaged in a clear plastic bag with a header card. Attached to the header card is another small tag. It gives some details about your creation, such as a “birth date”, title, artist, module (character), size, and DNA. The Title and Artist fields are blank on ours. I believe these are filled in if you purchase a pre-made figure from the Maqet gallery.

Even though these look and feel like resin, they are eco-friendly, biodegradable and made from a starch base. I’d advise against trying to eat your Maqet – it’s not a potato. The first thing that you’ll notice about your Maqet is the glossiness of the piece. There’s a heavy glaze on the entire piece, and it’s not because I was eating a Cruller while typing this. The paintwork on our Octi figure is…interesting. I’m not sure if it’s because the glaze mixed with the paint, but it looks a little “fuzzy”.

My thoughts? I’m a fan of the Maqet brand. There are definitely some suggestions I’d make to improve the experience. I’d love to be able to put some of your own graphics on the characters – that would make it truly a custom made piece. They do have plans to add some more designs from different artists (currently they’re all from Ghostbot), so I can’t really complain about the limited number of characters. But for $20, it’s a fun experience seeing your character turned into a little collectible figure.